In the big data era, the internet continues to play an increasingly significant role. Furthermore, the use of wireless means to transfer data has become more important. Large scale projects have even been considered to make the internet ubiquitous around the globe. The futuristic plans show a general trend that the backbone traffic of the internet may shift towards wireless mesh networks
Current network protocols are not ready for a complete transition to wireless mesh networks because they are largely based on the infrastructure of wired networks and point-to-point transmission models. For example, in order to overcome data loss, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) uses error detecting code to determine whether a packet is damaged during transmission, and uses automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocol to recover the damaged packets. Although TCP can recover the lost packets, its control mechanisms are designed for wired networks. In wireless networks, its disadvantages are obvious: the packets required by acknowledgments (ACK) and retransmissions take extra bandwidth, and it is not suitable for multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) applications.